First 5 Minutes of Play : What to Do
NOTE: This game seems to be no longer under active development. The author of the game, John Halter, has failed to provide continued updates on the development of the game and to forfill his obligations to the Kickstarter backers. The information below is provided for historic reasons. This article is designed to get you playing fast and understanding the basics in 5 minutes.First step, start the game, select "Start Game" then "Easy", when the game is done loading click "Click to continue" The Screen The first thing to take notice is you are controlling the bacteria in the center of the screen. The second thing to notice are the colored bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Here's what they mean : Red : Health or Lifetime - the health of this bacterium, it will constantly decrease as this bacterium will eventually die. When the red bar decreases to the far left side of the screen this bacterium will die. Yellow : Your Energy - moving around costs energy, but luckily your metabolism will constantly give you energy. If you run out of energy, just wait a bit and it will regenerate (unless something went wrong). If you try to move with no energy, you'll lose a slight amount of health. Orange : Protein - how much protein this cell has; for beginners the only importance to this is that protein is an easy way to quickly increase your size. Movement and Keys There are two important keys to remember : Escape 'bring up the menu '''Space '''bar pauses the game How to move 'Mouse Left mouse button - Moves the bacterium forward Right mouse button - Rotate the bacterium : If the mouse is on the left half of the screen, the bacterium rotates clockwise : If the mouse is on the right half of the screen, the bacterium rotates counterclockwise 'Keyboard' Up key - Moves the bacterium forward Left key - Rotates bacterium counterclockwise Right key- Rotates the bacterium clockwise For more information on movement and an explination for why its set up this way see Bacteria Movement Nutrients As you start moving around start aiming for and collecting nutrients. There are the starting nutrients you're going to want to collect. The only molecule you should probably avoid early on are Plasmids - which look like the image at left. The reason you might want to avoid these if you're new to the game, is if you uptake them into your bacteria, they will change the genes found in your bacteria. If you don't know how to handle plasmids yet, this can damage your bacteria. There are other things you should avoid, but those come later in the game. See Harmful Molecules Plasmids have the potential to become your best allies but only if used correctly, so if you're courageous, read about them now! Growth and Division Your first bacterium will probably die soon. All bacteria will eventually die. So you will want to divide in order to always have a bacterium to play with. If you don't have any bacteria you lose the game. Requirements There are two requirements for division: #Size - accumulate enough mass to create a new bacterium. #Nucleotides - accumulate enough nucleotides to create another copy of your genome. The simplest way to see how far along you are with these requirements is to press "6". Your nucleotides are in purple, and your size is in orange; both values are expressed as percentages (%), and you cannot divide until both numbers are near to maximal (100%). How To Divide Real bacteria usually have multiple different ways of getting things done, and this game also has multiple ways of getting things done. Dividing your bacteria is one of those things. The simplest way to divide your bacterium is to Press Escape to bring up the menu, and on the very top of the screen is Divide. It will appear green if you are able to divide, it will appear gray and tell you the requirement you do not meet if you cannot. Simply press divide and your bacterium will split into two bacteria, and these bacteria will have full health bars. Switching Between Bacteria Now that you have multiple bacteria, you can use Page Up and Page Down to switch between bacteria. Another (somewhat more advanced way) is to go to Micropedia->Player and select the bacterium you want. What to do Next? The information provided here should get you pretty far, but will not be enough to produce a stable population of bacteria for very long. Eventually you will need to know how evolution, metabolism, and special abilities work. So here are some tutorials on those topics : Getting Started with Genetics Getting Started with Metabolism Gettings Started with Special Abilities Random Tips For more tips see : Tips for Playing #Don't wait until your first bacterium is about to die to divide. The offspring bacterium might have a bad mutation and die quickly. #Don't be shy with the pause button; no need to waste your bacterium's life as you do some micro-management #At the beginning your metabolism is inefficient, which means that you need to let the drift of the nutrients do most of the work for you. Don't waste energy getting closer when something is drifting your way. #Watch for patterns of which bacteria prefer certain kinds of nutrients, since it is a waste of your energy to rush towards a nutrient source ahead of another bacterium when that cell isn't interested in the nutrient anyway. Inversely, don't wast energy trying to get a nutrient that is already being targeted by a nearer bacterium. #The Evolutionary History of each game is random, so even though you might have chosen "Easy" as your mode option, the real difficulty depends on how the other bacteria evolve. If evolution is not favorable for your bacterium, you can have a very difficult start no matter what play setting you chose. Category:Tutorials